Another cartoonist new to this blog (like Ken Krimstein, recently posted on). The Loose Parts cartoon by Blazek below (from 2010) came to me from the Grammarly Facebook page via a friend:
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Pin the Apostrophe on the Word.
There’s a rich vein of cartoons mocking English teachers for their purported inclination to focus on minutiae.
On the strip, from Wikipedia:
Loose Parts is a daily single panel comic strip drawn by Dave Blazek since 2001. It is similar in tone, content, and style to The Far Side, drawn by Gary Larson, involving Theatre of the Absurd-style themes and characters. Loose Parts is syndicated by Tribune Media Services and appears in newspapers across the country and overseas.
More detail on the David Wasting Paper site, about cartoonists:
Cartoonist, graphic artist, former stand-up comedian and film and audio director, Dave Blazek was born in March of 1957. He graduated from Pennsylvania State University with a Journalism degree. As a former stand-up comedian he performed at comedy clubs in and around the Philadelphia area. Dave has won over 130 creative awards for his work in advertising, writing and directing print, radio and television commercials for regional and national clients. While working in the advertising department at The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News in 1999, he collaborated with illustrator John Gilpin to create the single panel comic strip, “Loose Parts”. At the same time he was writing for Comedy Central’s “Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist”. In 2001 John Gilpin got sick and decided to stop drawing for “Loose Parts”. Dave took over drawing the strip and he still handles both duties of writing and drawing… He also draws the comic “Biz” which appears in the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Sunday Business section.
Another Loose Parts:
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Play on the ambiguity of mobile: management was aiming for mobile ‘mobile phone’ (a nouning by truncation), but the employes have provided themselves with mobiles ‘scuptures that are suspended so as to turn freely in the air’ — a usage that appears to have been coined directly from the adjective mobile ‘able to move freely or easily’ (by Marcel Duchamp in 1931, with reference to sculptures by Alexander Calder). The icon for the phone, a Calder:
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These two nouns are identical in spelling, but not pronunciation: the phone is a /móbǝl/ or /móbàjl/, the sculpture is a /móbìl/ (and Mobile AL is /mòbíl/).
You can probably find examples of another nouning by truncation mobile, meaning ‘mobile unit’ or ‘mobile van’; from Merriam-Webster Online:
mobile unit: an establishment on wheels (as an automobile or trailer) equipped for some special service (as a traveling library, an ambulance, an X-ray clinic, or television pickup)
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